Please Help! Looking for suggestions on a new computer build!

[Nelson37]

I really, really, really could not recommend AMD to anyone at this time, and I am a long-time user of their products. It may well be a dead-end platform. But there are some values there.

Future upgradeability is to me a major concern, re-sellability can be an issue. Four RAM slots instead of two may not be needed now, but in a year or two?

Same with the RAM speed, if the board and chip support it, the $68.00 may be well spent. In maybe six months, if you can sell the old RAM for close to what you paid, then buy the faster RAM at a lower price, this might be a way to go.

Some things can be upgraded cheap, some not. Extra RAM on a four-slot board, no problem. 800 MHZ RAM to 1066 involves Removing the old RAM and chucking it out the window.

That 2600 card is good for HDMI-out, but as a gaming card, it ain't great, I have one. You could Crossfire it for some improvement, but for gaming, Nvidia rules. Two of their older cards, one in a slower PC, both beat the ATI card to death. That 8800GT you are looking at is lightyears ahead. DVI to HDMI works just as well for TV-out.

Strongly recommend stick with stock hsf unless overclocking. That's a lot of waranty to void on an expensive part.

[SingSing]

A lot of these new technologies don't get us a lot more real performance.

Like dual channel memeory, that it hardly give us any edge, I was suprised when I put together the first MB with it, then I find out TOM_Hardware also saw the same outcome.

Even dual core pentium does not do anything near twice off pentium-4. They just run cooler and quieter.

Pentium is better than the cheap Celeron mostly due to the bigger cache. So it only has advantage on large and high end applications.

I used Pc-wizard and Sandra to bench mark upgrade, and see less and less improvment with new MB, CPU, GPU, hard drive, memory... Are the PC technologies stalled ?